I’ve found myself repeating this question to the few people I interact with these days, from a safe distance of course (how odd that we now have to qualify that our interactions with actual humans are safe and socially distanced). This question was brought into my life a few years ago as I dove deeply…

When the Securitate would enter our house, my sister and I would hide in the bathroom, the one where the tile and commode and even the porcelain tub was pink, and tell each other stories. There was the story of the gypsies who kidnapped fair-headed children like ourselves, cut off a hand or foot, then…

Long before I knew romance with a boyfriend, I learned how to love, and love intensely, from my friend Ashley. “You are my SPNQ (SPOH-neek),” we would say to each other. It was code for “I love you,” invented some silly night at a girls’ retreat when we were maybe 15, 16 years old. It…

“You should never be a mom.” “You would be a horrible mother.” Not sure the number of times I heard these lines through my childhood, but it was often enough that these words took root in my life and grew deep.